TL;DR : I cannot, in good conscience, recommend this MUD to anyone.
What I can say is that the code is solid, a good amount of the players
are generally agreeable - if not outright great - and the idea of the
theme of the game is mildly interesting. If you absolutely have to
give this MUD a try, my advice is this : stay the holy hell away from
the imms and literally anyone who banters with them on the OOC
channels or the Discord. Additionally, stay far, far away from any of
the game's coded guilds, and the OOC channels within. You will save
yourself a LOT of the grief that comes with this MUD.

Theme : The basic theme of TI:L is that of Order versus Mages. The
Holy Order of Dav is placed on-grid and generally comprised of players
that attempt to justify the decisions of the Holy Order in it's
eternal fight against the forces of evil that are comprised of the
Ruebus Manus, the Mages on-grid. The secondary theme of the MUD is
that the Reeves of Lithmore are locked in a constant struggle against
the Brotherhood of Common Goods, basically playing cops and robbers
with one another until one takes a momentary victory and sits upon
their laurels. All of this sounds really good. And it is - the theme
of the MUD is great! There's even hidden and esoteric literature
scattered around the game that will give you a deeper, darker
understanding of the theme that others dance around and play with, and
exploring these hidden tomes is absolutely worth it. The people that
set up the theme to TI wrote an incredibly dark and compelling story,
and it really does show when you examine it. Of course, you'll never
examine it, you'll be berated for examining it, and the theme has
largely been killed off by the GM's of the game. And by “largely
killed off,” I mean “practically mutilated beyond repair.” Now,
I've seen a lot of the past reviews get dismissed for 'trolling'
for pointing this out, so let me explain. I listed what I viewed as
the core gameplay of the MUD above. Order v Manus, Reeves v Thieves.
The problem – right off the bat - is that the Manus has been shut
down as a guild. No problem, just have it Order v Mages, right? No,
that's mostly discouraged as well. As some of the other reviews have
pointed out in detail, player-killing is met with a pretty enormous
amount of suspicion, especially when it's done by the Holy Order. In
fact, as previous reviews have pointed out, people have been thrown
out of the Holy Order for doing this. I can very clearly recall two
very recent cases, one that happened realistically not even a few
months ago, as of this review. So, certainly, the other core gameplay
of the game must be alive and well? Absolutely not. The Reeves have
long been regarded as a joke with basically zero numbers, and the
Thieves are basically in the same boat. Every now and again, for the
last few years, there would be flashes of interesting RP between the
two, but it's mostly just dead. I think that in the last two years,
the best Reeve numbers I've seen has been four active ones, and the
best Thief (Brotherhood) numbers I've seen were three or four. Now
that you can't dual-guild (joining two guilds in order to infiltrate
one for the other, or have a legitimate cover for being in places),
the numbers are laughably low. To the point where I'm very surprised
they haven't shut down every guild but the Merchants and the Order to
give a modicum of story to stand behind, and just let everything be
player-driven cliques. So, what do the players mostly do on TI?
Honestly? They sit around in bars and talk about this and that.
Sometimes the bar-sitting is broken up by some RP about business deals
with the Merchants, sometimes they do training sessions – a few
players have taken it upon themselves to actually provide RP to that
note, and it's really great. But, realistically, what you'll be
mostly doing on TI is just listening to people talk and sitting in
bars. Unfortunately, the theme of the game is mostly dead, and it's
pretty well-known among the playerbase that pointing this out is a
one-way ticket to the social poopy list. I say it's unfortunate with
a heavy heart, because I had the opportunity to talk to some older
players, who willy-nilly explained the grit of the game to me, and the
plot that happened before 2016-ish sounded absolutely incredible and
deeply rewarding.

Players : By and large, the playerbase of TI is mid-range to
excellent. Mostly what you'll wind up getting is players whom you
generally enjoy interacting with, with their personal quirks that you
end up getting to know very well, and eventually settle down with and
RP with for hundreds of hours in your TI career. A (very) small
portion of these players will inevitably leave a very positive
out-of-character impression on you, and will go well above and beyond
the call of duty for any MUD player to accommodate your RP style and
help you out – even OOC'ly – with any problems you may come
across. In the defense of TI, I've actually met some of the nicest
and friendliest people that I know in real life on this game, and
I've made some very real friends out of character. Of course, no good
thing is without it's thorns, and TI absolutely has thorns when it
comes to the playerbase. The “bad” of TI's playerbase is... I
mean, it's bad. It's really bad. Bad to the point where there's a
series of characters who single-handedly made a trope about luring
young women into the public park, abducting them, and killing them in
order to gain in-character power. It's exactly how it sounds. Or, in
the case of players who were actually banned by the imms, going around
with about zero in-character reasoning and just seeing how much
out-of-character griefing you could get away with, such as killing
player pets, randomly locking people in public rooms, or basically
just going around and murder-hobo'ing people with little to no
in-character reasoning. The best part of this situation is when you
know it's them that's done it, and yet you have to sit and watch
them at the weekly OOC meeting getting treated with a great deal of
respect and out-of-character clout because they're promoting
“antagonist RP,” and whining about how no one wants to RP with
them. Often, these are the types of people who will often walk away
from the keyboard and whine to the GM's once they're put into a
situation where they're being griefed. What I will say is that on TI,
you'll meet some of the best and the worst people that you've ever
had the chance to MUD with. You only need to look at the official
forums for a day to see clear evidence of that. But, with all good
things must come bad things. My personal advice would be to stay the
heck out of any and all out-of-character interaction until you're
absolutely certain that the person on the other side of the screen
isn't some raging narcissist who is attempting to lure you into their
cult of personality so they can have more numbers to go around the MUD
murdering people.

Upper Management : Other reviews have stated this in-depth, and I
don't think that I really want to beat a dead horse horribly. What I
will say is that there are four visible imms : Kinaed, Temi, Niamh,
and Azarial. The only one I've even remotely gotten along with is
Azarial, and they only handle coding. For all the rest, you need only
go over the official forums to get a view of what's happening behind
the scenes. I try not to interact with them at all, but from
everything that I've been told that has been backed up with logs,
they're absolutely god-awful. I'll try not to go on about it. So
many other reviews have that you should absolutely get the point. In
the group that I'm getting help from, however, the favorite quote
from staff is this, “Theme is fluid.” A meme that, evidently, is
pulled out so often one of them has something to say at the OOC
meeting about how a plot/character/whatever makes absolutely no sense
in the canon of the game that they've since been beaten down into
giving up making any sense of the new lore of the game that the imms
are building. I believe my personal “I'm uncomfortable with where
this is going,” was the Monarch plot, which was posted about with a
great deal of pride from the head admin. All the flavor text had the
same bit : “To place the decision in player hands, The Inquisition:
Legacy is running a plot event in which characters will take actions
to sway the minds of the player and NPC nobility over the next several
weeks. “ From everything that I've seen – and you can see, too!
They've actually got a great mechanic where in-character event posts
are posted to the forums. Every guildleader or important character has
wholeheartedly supported the Queen. I've been informed by many
people, though, that the Queen is getting absolutely decimated in the
polls by NPC nobility which are – you guessed it – run by the
staff. Every shred of evidence that I've seen has indicated that this
is just a railroaded campaign with more steps, and yet the staff are
shilling it, and shilling it hard across TMC, Reddit, etc as one of
the best (and only?) staff-run plots they've done in an eternity. I
don't know, I honestly don't. I try not to bother anyone with my RP,
because, you know, it's mine. From every review I've read, though,
and nearly every OOC source I've spoken to, people abhor these
admins. Stay away and stick to the game itself, I suppose.

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